The present invention relates to a counseling system of products or merchandise and a product development program and more particularly to a counseling system of products or merchandise for giving counseling to the customer for a cosmetic product that suits her/him based on product data stored in a server and to a product development program.
A sales strategy is known, for example, in which a beauty assistant at a store observes the customer's skin or other parts to give counseling and selects the most suitable cosmetic product for the customer. In accordance with such a sales strategy, it is the beauty assistant who is a trained specialist that observes the skin condition of the customer and selects the most suitable cosmetic product for the customer, and therefore, the cosmetic product that satisfies the customer can be selected.
Further, the beauty assistant holds a conversation with the customer to obtain information related to images and characteristics (for example, fragrance and feel upon application to skin) of a cosmetic product that the customer requires and this information is also used as one of the criteria for selecting a cosmetic product. Thus, a cosmetic product that gives a sufficient level of satisfaction rating to the customer can be selected.
On the other hand, for a manufacturer of cosmetic products, information on the use of the product is very important in developing new products. Therefore, conventionally, evaluation of the use of a cosmetic product is carried out.
Conventionally, a method of evaluating the use of a cosmetic product is known in which people who evaluate the cosmetic product are hired in advance or monitors selected from the general public are recruited (hereinafter, these people are referred to as panelists), and then the cosmetic product to be evaluated is actually used by the panelists in order that the panelists can evaluate the use of the cosmetic product. In the use evaluation method described above, evaluation of the use is normally a satisfaction rating evaluation in which satisfaction is expressed in several grades from “very good” to “very bad”.
However, as for the method in which a cosmetic product is selected in accordance with the result of counseling given by the beauty assistant, the content of counseling may vary due to factors such as how experienced is the beauty assistant. Therefore, there is a problem that levels of counseling may be different between individual beauty assistants.
Also, according to the conventional method, the customer must actually to go to a store to receive counseling, so that it may bother the customer and lead to the customer making her/his own decision and purchasing cosmetic products that are not actually suited to her/his skin. In such a case, it is difficult to acquire the skin condition required by the customer, since the cosmetic products are not suited to her/his skin and the customer is not aware of this fact.
On the other hand, according to the conventional usage evaluation method mentioned above, a considerable number of panelists are necessary for an accurate evaluation. In other words, in order to improve reliability and validity of usage evaluation, it is necessary to have a considerable number of panelists to make evaluations such that there are no biases between characteristics and attributes of the panelists. However, there is a problem that in practice it is difficult to have these panelists available.